The Testament of Ann Lee Review: This Musical Biography May Be the Weirdest Movie You’ll See This Year

The Testament of Ann Lee, a biographical musical about the woman who founded the Shaker movement in America, is a confounding film that fascinates and exhausts in equal measure. There’s really nothing quite like it out there. 

Amanda Seyfried plays the titular Ann Lee, an 18th century, deeply devout woman who joined the “Shaking Quakers” and, after losing a series of children in childbirth or shortly thereafter, become convinced that “sexual sin” was the reason for her tribulations. She swore off sex and, after a vision, announced herself the second coming of Christ. Eventually she and a handful of followers left Manchester to form a conclave in upstate New York, establishing the rare woman-led religious community. Their numbers swelled for a time, but thinned dramatically after Lee’s death, and now the religious movement is mostly remembered for making some truly excellent furniture that mimicked the sect’s unshowy, utilitarian ethos.

Seyfried gives a fully committed performance of this grimly beatific anti-fornication crusader. You feel the effort – there’s no way not to, what with the labored Mancunian accent, the strange diction of a bygone era and manneredness of religious speech, plus the “is Mother Ann a loony” question that hangs over the whole picture. But the visible effort doesn’t detract from how singularly compelling Seyfried is – pause here for a reminder of her range, from her Mean Girls lovable ditz and as a quiet anchor in noisy musicals Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables to co-leading the throwback thriller The Housemaid, a huge hit. She deserves to be more in the Oscar conversation, but she’s getting drowned out by the year’s more widely-seen Aching Mom performances from Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s Rose Byrne.

Well, and because of the film’s inherent weirdness. How you receive this testament may be colored by your own relationship to religion; I never could quite suss out what the filmmakers thought about their subject. I haven’t seen Mona Fastvold’s two previous directorial efforts, 2014’s The Sleepwalker and 2020’s The World to Come, but the films she’s co-written with partner Brady Corbet – 2015’s Childhood of a Leader, 2018’s Vox Lux, and 2024’s The Brutalist– are streaked with self-seriousness. (Corbet co-wrote The Testament of Ann Lee with Fastvold.) I read their latest as straightforward and severe, until I started scanning the edges. There’s the orgiastic dance sequences in such contrast to the sect’s celibacy. There’s a musical number as the pilgrims search for a plot of land in the new world that plays positively Python-esque. And there’s the face of Ann’s husband (Christopher Abbott) as the realization dawns he’s married to a woman who plans to never fuck him again. Reader, I snorted. But I wasn’t certain I was meant to. 

An undeniably novel film that nevertheless lost its novelty for me around the time the Shakers washed up on American shores (that’s about an hour in?), The Testament of Ann Lee still had me in its grip every time a musical number rolled around, which is often enough. Choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall injects spasmic energy into dances that explicitly articulate the sublimated desires of the celibate Shakers, while Daniel Blumberg (Oscar winner for The Brutalist) tinkers with Shaker traditionals and elevates them to the sublime. And yet: Late in the film, an anachronistic electric guitar enters the score in an absolute record scratch moment. And that’s pretty much the film in a nutshell, which minute to minute had me clapping my hands and scratching my head.

Bless its dear heart. I’m never gonna be mad at a movie for sticking its neck out. 

This article appears in January 16 • 2026.